Robot farm workers take to the fields

To feed a growing population, we will need to double food production by 2050 – yet fewer people want to work the land. One solution could be robotic labour. Here are six systems, real and imagined, which could help farmers of the future. Ben Crystall

Hortibot

Created by Rasmus Jørgensen and a team at Aarhus University in Denmark in 2007, Hortibot is a prototype agricultural robot that uses autonomous navigation, cameras and a variety of tools to carry out repetitive tasks in the fields.

(Image: Aarhus University)

SprayCell

Hortibot's tools include this sprayer prototype, SprayCell. It uses cameras and image analysis software to identify and locate crops and weeds. A row of spray nozzles then gives the weeds alone a dose of herbicide, which could halve the amount of weedkiller used on farms. Field experiments using a prototype SprayCell with a 2.25-metre-long spray boom are under way.

(Image: Aarhus University)

MIT Robot Gardener

Students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a "distributed robotics garden": four cherry tomato plants, each with its own sensors, tended by six small robots. The robots and plants communicate through a wireless network, with the plants monitoring their own soil humidity and calling for water when necessary. As well as keeping the soil moist, the robots detect when tomatoes are ripe and pick the fruit.

(Image: Nikolaus Correll/CSAIL)

Robotic dairies

The first commercial robotic milking machines appeared in the 1990s, and now thousands of farmers in Europe and North America rely on robots to milk their herds. Farmers benefit from having less work to do, though at about $200,000 each, the systems don't come cheap. Next step: robotic milking for buffalo.

(Image: Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)

Vineyard bot

Engineer Christophe Millot has designed "Wall-Ye" to prune vines. The small robot, with four wheels and two metal arms, has GPS sensors and six web cameras, and can trundle between vines, test the soil and check grapes. Eventually Millot hopes Wall-Ye will be able to prune up to 600 vines per day.

(Image: Robert Pratta/Reuters)

Space garden-bots

Hollywood created one of the first visions of gardening bots. In Silent Running, an environmentally themed sci-fi movie released in 1972, small bots Huey and Dewey are taught to care for plants preserved in giant greenhouses aboard a spaceship orbiting near Saturn.